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footsteps clattered on the slate foyer with all the warmth of frozen earth shoveled upon the glinting lid of a steel coffin.
    I showered off the mud and grit of Cooke County, and I tried to steam away the ache in my thighs and shoulders. Then—with a mixture of sinking hope and rising dread—I crawled into my unmade bed.
    After hours of tossing, I finally slept, and I dreamt of a woman. In the way that is common in dreams, she was a generic, unspecified woman at first, doing something generic and unspecified. Then she looked at me, and suddenly she looked quite specific and very afraid. A hand reached out and stroked her cheek. Then it slid downward and closed around her throat. The woman, I now saw, was my wife, and the hand, I now realized, was my own. A look of pleading filled her eyes, and then a look of sorrow. And then her eyes turned to empty sockets, and her mouth to a vacant oval. But I was the one who gave voice to the scream. “Kathleen!”
    Heart pounding, sweat and tears flowing, I awoke—as I had every night for the past two years—to find myself alone in the bed. Alone in our bed. No—alone in my bed. My empty, lifeless bed in my empty, lifeless house in my empty, lifeless life.

    CHAPTER 6

    THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY, ROBERT ROPER, gave me a rueful nod as I headed toward the witness stand, ragged and bleary-eyed. I’d testified as a witness for Bob in half a dozen murder cases, but today I was testifying for the other side, hoping to demolish his charge that Eddie Meacham had murdered Billy Ray Ledbetter.
    As a forensic anthropologist, my obligation is to the truth, not to prosecutors or police. In practice, speaking the truth usually means speaking for murder victims, and often that means testifying for prosecutors. Not this time, though. This time, I was speaking for Billy Ray Ledbetter, and I was convinced he hadn’t been murdered by his friend Eddie. But speaking that truth—at least, on behalf of the defense attorney who had roped me into this—was going to stick in my craw so tight I might need to be Heimliched right there on the witness stand.
    The bailiff rattled off what I assume was the routine swearing-in question—I wondered if he dabbled in auctioneering on the side, such was his speed—and I assented. Then Burt DeVriess stood to question me, and I felt my hackles rise. I reminded myself that I was here as a witness for DeVriess and his client, but it wasn’t easy to suppress years of animosity. In almost every East Tennessee murder trial in which I’d testified for the prosecution, DeVriess—nicknamed
    “Da Grease” by local cops—had served as defense counsel. The guiltier you were, and the more heinous your crime, the more you needed Grease. At least, that’s the way things seemed. Serial rapists, child molesters, drug kingpins, stone-cold killers: the dregs of humanity—or inhumanity—were Burt DeVriess’s bread and butter. I had faced him from the witness chair a dozen times before, and his cross-examinations had never failed to enrage me. Some of that anger was a natural response to the legal system’s adversarial structure, which I didn’t much like. It was maddening to do a meticulous forensic exam, then hear it challenged and undermined by the sort of careerist witnesses widely known as “defense whores”: Yes, theoretically, I suppose it’s possible, as Dr. Brockton claims, that the skull fracture might have been caused by the bloody baseball bat found beside the body. However, in my expert opinion, the fracture more likely resulted from the impact of a large, anomalous hailstone …
    Although I resented that sort of far-fetched second-guessing, I wrote it off as a necessary evil. But what I couldn’t forgive or forget was the way DeVriess would skillfully impugn my professional and personal integrity in the slyest, most underhanded of ways. His favorite tactic was to pose an outrageous question that would be struck down immediately…right after it had been etched